PayPal Inc. co-founder and Affirm’s CEO Max Levchin on center stage during day one of Collision 2019 at Enercare Center in Toronto, Canada.
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LONDON — Buy now, pay later firm Affirm launched Monday its installment loans in the U.K., in the company’s first expansion overseas.
Founded in 2012, Affirm is an American fintech firm that offers flexible pay-over-time payment options. The company says it underwrites every individual transaction before making a lending decision, and doesn’t charge any late fees.
Affirm, which is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, said its U.K. offering will include interest-free and interest-bearing monthly payment options. Interest on its plans will be fixed and calculated on the original principal amount, meaning it won’t increase or compound.
The company’s expansion to the U.K. marks the first time it is launching in a market outside the U.S. and Canada. Globally, Affirm counts over 50 million users and more than 300,000 active merchants, including Amazon, Shopify and Walmart.
Among the first merchants offering Affirm as a payment method in the U.K. are Alternative Airlines, the flight booking website, and payments processing firm Fexco. Affirm said it expects to onboard more brands over the coming months.
Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, told CNBC that the company had been working on its launch in the U.K. for over a year. The reason Affirm chose Britain as its first overseas expansion target was because it saw a lot of demand from merchants in the country, according to Levchin.
“It is a huge market, it’s English-speaking,” making it a great fit for the business, Levchin said in an interview last week ahead of Affirm’s U.K. launch. Affirm will eventually expand into other markets that aren’t English-speaking but this will take more work, he added.
“There are lots of competitors here who are doing a sensible job serving the market. But when we started doing merchant outreach, just to find out locally, is the market saturated? Does everybody feel well served?” Levchin said. “We got such an enormous amount of market pull. It kind of sealed the deal for us.”
Fierce competition
Competition is fierce in the U.K. financial technology space. In the buy now, pay later segment Affirm focuses on, the company will find no shortage of competition in the form of sizable players like Klarna, Block’s Clearpay, Zilch, and PayPal, which entered the BNPL market in 2020.
Where Affirm differs to some of those players, according to Levchin, is that its range of financing products offer customers the ability to pay purchases off over much lengthier periods. For example, Affirm offers payment programs that last as long as 36 months.
Affirm’s launch in the U.K. comes as the government is consulting on plans to regulate the buy now, pay later industry.
Among the key measures the government is considering, is plans to require BNPL providers to provide clear information to consumers, ensure people aren’t paying more than they can afford, and give customers rights for when issues arise.
“Generally speaking, we welcome regulation that is thoughtful, that pushes the work onto the market to do the right thing, but also knows how not to be too cumbersome on the end-customer,” Levchin said.
“Telling us do lots of work in the background before you lend money is great. We’re very good at automating. We’re very good at writing software. We’ll go do the work,” he added. “Pushing the onus on the consumer is dangerous.”
Affirm secured authorization from the Financial Conduct Authority, the country’s financial services watchdog, after months of discussions with the regulator, Levchin said. He added that the firm’s “pristine reputation” helped.
“We’ve never charged a penny of late fees. We don’t do deferred interest. We don’t do any sort of the anti-consumer stuff people struggle with,” Levchin told CNBC. “So we have this good, untarnished reputation of being just very thoughtfully pro-consumer. And merchants love that.”
Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB, testifies during the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing titled “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Semi-Annual Report to Congress,” in the Dirksen Building on Nov. 30, 2023.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday issued a finalized version of a rule saying it will soon supervise nonbank firms that offer financial services likes payments and wallet apps.
Tech giants and payments firms that handle at least 50 million transactions annually will fall under the review, which is meant to ensure the newer entrants adhere to the laws that banks and credit unions abide by, the CFPB said in a release. That would include popular services from Apple and Google, as well as payment firms like PayPal and Block.
While the CFPB already had some authority over digital payment companies because of its oversight of electronic fund transfers, the new rule allows it to treat tech companies more like banks. It makes the firms subject to “proactive examinations” to ensure legal compliance, enabling it to demand records and interview employees.
“Digital payments have gone from novelty to necessity and our oversight must reflect this reality,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “The rule will help to protect consumer privacy, guard against fraud, and prevent illegal account closures.”
A year ago, the CFPB said it wanted to extend its oversight to tech and fintech companies that offer financial services but that have sidestepped more scrutiny by partnering with banks. Americans are increasingly using payment apps as de facto bank accounts, storing cash and making everyday purchases through their mobile phones.
The most popular apps covered by the rule collectively process more than 13 billion consumer payments a year, and have gained “particularly strong adoption” among low- and middle-income users, the CFPB said on Thursday.
“What began as a convenient alternative to cash has evolved into a critical financial tool, processing over a trillion dollars in payments between consumers and their friends, families, and businesses,” the regulator said.
The initial proposal would’ve subjected companies that process at least 5 million transactions annually to some of the same examinations that the CFPB conducts on banks and credit unions. That threshold got raised to 50 million transactions in the final rule, the agency said Thursday.
Payment apps that only work at a particular retailer, like Starbucks, are excluded from the rule.
The new CFPB rule is one of the rare instances where the U.S. banking industry publicly supported the regulator’s actions; banks have long felt that tech firms making inroads in financial services ought to be more scrutinized.
The CFPB said the rule will take effect 30 days after its publication in the Federal Register.
Check out the companies making headlines before the bell. Snowflake – Shares surged more than 21% following the company’s better-than-expected third-quarter results and strong guidance. Snowflake posted adjusted earnings of 20 cents per share on revenue of $942 million. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were looking for 15 cents in earnings per share on revenue of $897 million. Palo Alto Networks – The cybersecurity stock fell 2% after the company issued fiscal second-quarter guidance largely in-line with expectations. Palo Alto Networks guided for adjusted earnings of $1.54 to $1.56 per share on revenue of $2.22 billion to $2.25 billion. That was roughly in line with the Street’s forecast of $1.55 per share in earnings and $2.23 billion in revenue, per FactSet. Palo Alto also announced a 2-for-1 stock split. Nvidia – Shares of the chipmaker fell around 1% despite its third-quarter earnings results topping Wall Street’s expectations . The company posted 81 cents in adjusted earnings per share on revenue of $35.08 billion, while analysts had penciled in 75 cents in earnings per share on revenue of $33.16 billion, according to LSEG. Crypto-related stocks – Stocks tied to bitcoin moved higher after the price of the cryptocurrency hit $98,000 for the first time . MicroStrategy soared about 11%, while Coinbase jumped nearly 4%. Others linked to the cryptocurrency like miner Mara Holdings and financial services platform Robinhood also saw gains, rising almost 10% and more than 3%, respectively. Baidu – U.S. shares of the Chinese search engine fell more than 1% after the company’s third-quarter revenue declined by 3% compared to the year-ago period . That said, Baidu posted a 12% increase in its non-online marketing revenue, which was mainly driven by its artificial intelligence cloud business. BJ’s Wholesale Club – The stock popped nearly 8% after the warehouse club reported a third-quarter earnings beat and raised its full-year guidance. BJ’s also announced a plan to repurchase $1 billion shares and said it will raise its membership fee. Merus – Shares gained 2.5% after Goldman Sachs initiated coverage of the cancer therapeutics company with a buy rating, saying it sees big gains ahead on the back of Merus’ cancer treatment. — CNBC’s Sarah Min, Hakyung Kim and Michelle Fox Theobald contributed reporting.
Baidu on Nov. 12, 2024, unveiled a pair of glasses with a built-in AI assistant, putting up a Chinese rival to the Meta Ray-Bans that have proven a rare success in AI-powered hardware.
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BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Baidu on Thursday posted a 3% annual drop in third-quarter revenue, nevertheless beating market expectations amid AI cloud growth.
The revenue print came in at $4.78 billion for the quarter ending on Sept. 30. Net income for the period rose by 14% to $1.09 billion.
Baidu noted a 12% surge in its non-online marketing revenue to the equivalent of $1.1 billion, mainly driven by its artificial intelligence cloud business.
Here’s what analysts expected the company to report for the quarter, according to LSEG estimates:
Revenue: $4.63 billion
Net income: $857.17 million
Baidu had reported revenue of 34.45 billion yuan ($4.75 billion) and net income of 6.68 billion yuan for the third quarter of 2023.
Beijing-based Baidu operates one of the major web browser search engines in China, along with a frequently used maps app. The company also sells cloud computing services. Online marketing drives a significant portion of the firm’s revenue.
In artificial intelligence, Baidu has promoted its Ernie chatbot as a local alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which isn’t available in China. Ernie bot now has 430 million users, Baidu said last week.
The company this month also announced that its Xiaodu AI Glasses will begin sales in the first half of next year. The wearable has at least one camera and uses Ernie’s AI capabilities and Baidu’s maps and search functions. While Baidu hasn’t revealed a price, the product is widely expected to be a Chinese alternative to Meta’s popular Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Baidu announced a management rotation last month, with Junjie He, formerly head of the mobile ecosystem group, becoming the company’s interim Chief Financial Officer, while former CFO Rong Luo assumed leadership of the mobile division.